A multitalented writer, polemist, and literary theorist, Adrienne Cecile Rich is an exponent of a poetry of witness and dissent, a poetry that voices the discontent of those generally silenced and ignored. Prophetic of the bitterness that emerged from 1960s feminism, antiwar protests of the 1970s, and the 1990s gay rights movement, her mature poems breached caution to strike at resentment against sexism and human victimization. In token of shifts in her generation's consciousness, her own awakening extols the personal epiphanies that free the underclass. Radical in content, consciously power-wielding in style, her works embrace language as a liberating, democratizing force.
Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929. Against the intellectual battleground of a Jewish father and Protestant mother, in childhood, she produced two respectable dramas: Ariadne: A Play in Three Acts and Poems (1939) and Not I, But Death (1941). After her father introduced her to poetry, she focused on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Butler Yeats. A Phi Beta Kappan, she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe the year she won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for A Change of World (1951). The book contained W. H. Auden's introduction, a literary coup for a beginning poet.
